So much so that during a Getty colloquium (“Looking West: The Photography of Carleton Watkins” held Feb. 25, 1996), Amy Rule, head archivist at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., observed, “We know a few things about Watkins’ early life that are helpful in studying his work, but there’s an awful lot we don’t know and may never know. … In recovering the past, we should guard against inferences based on lack of information and inflating what information we have in order to fill in the blanks.”

If the citations, assumptions and attributions Naef presents are accepted, then he will have successfully filled in almost all of the blanks, along with crediting to Watkins 17 gold rush-era daguerreotypes previously designated as “Unknown maker” – attributions that will likely enhance the value of the Getty’s extensive Watkins collection.

“The gold rush was this huge international event that drew people from around the world to California. It was the news story of the day,” notes Oakland Museum curator of photography Drew Johnson.

“It occurred at a point where photography was just about a decade old,” he explains. “It was new enough to be terribly exciting, but it was old enough to be an established profession, to the point that there were hundreds of working photographers that were willing to drop everything and come to California along with all the people that wanted to strike it rich. It created this huge demand for portraits, views of businesses and mining claims.

“These were people that did not aspire to create art. The daguerreotypist was on a par with a dentist or tinsmith – a small businessman with a certain amount of specialized technical knowledge that could be used to turn a profit. If you were an itinerant photographer, which a lot of daguerreotypists were, you would go to a mining camp and hang out a shingle. If there was mining going on in the vicinity, you would go where the action was.”

The biographical evidence (prior to the opening of “Dialogue Among Giants”) states that Watkins arrived in San Francisco on May 5, 1851, possessing no knowledge whatsoever of photography. By 1853, he is employed as a clerk one block from the San Francisco studio of daguerreotypist Robert H. Vance (1825-1876). And it was Vance that taught Watkins the art of photography.

Naef asserts that Vance trained Watkins, not in San Francisco but in South America, and thus it was Watkins, not Vance, that produced the bulk of California’s gold rush photographs – despite the fact that his name does not appear on a single daguerreotype, whereas Vance’s work is thoroughly documented.

“We’re dealing with an obscure artist,” said Naef during the exhibition’s press preview. “Everybody would like to see the daguerreotypes made by Robert Vance, not Carleton Watkins. And it now turns out that Robert Vance made none of the daguerreotypes, probably, that his name is put to, and that Watkins was the real maker. Vance is the famous person. He would be the one that everybody would like me to prove was the maker of the pictures.”

For more than 30 years, Naef has been the art community’s most outspoken champion (and museum collector) of Watkins’ work.

When asked for his opinion of the attributions advanced in “Dialogue of Giants,” James Eason, archivist and chief librarian of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley (a major repository of gold rush-era photography), responded, “Weston Naef certainly has an experienced eye and unquestioned expertise in 19th-century photography of the American West. If he has made new attributions to Watkins, they will certainly be taken seriously and given considerable weight.

“Our policy is that we very rarely reattribute an unattributed photograph,” he says, “particularly 19th-century photographs, because these guys were trained to use certain conventions that appear over and over again. To reattribute a photograph we would want corroborating evidence. Compositional similarities are very, very iffy and very subjective.”